At present what is the situation? Most unemployed work-people are
entitled to receive certain payments from the Employment Exchanges under
a so-called Insurance scheme, which is administered on a national basis;
some weeks they are entitled to receive those payments, other weeks they
are not; but in any case those payments afford relief which is
admittedly inadequate, and they are supplemented--and very materially
supplemented--by sums varying from one locality to another, but within
each locality on a uniform scale, which are paid by the Boards of
Guardians in the form of outdoor relief. Now that situation is highly
unsatisfactory. The system of outdoor relief and the machinery of the
Guardians are not adapted for work of this kind. They are designed to
meet the problem of individual cases of distress, not necessarily
arising from unemployment, but in any event individual cases to be dealt
with, each on its own merits, after detailed inquiry into the special
circumstances of the case. That is the function which the Guardians are
fitted to perform, and it is a most important function, which will still
have to be discharged by the Guardians, or by similar local bodies,
whatever the national system of unemployment relief may be. But for
dealing with unemployment wholesale, for paying relief in accordance
with a fixed scale and without regard to individual circumstances--for
that work the Guardians are a most inappropriate body. They possess no
qualification for it which the Central Government does not possess,
while they have some special and serious disqualifications.
In any case, it is preposterous that you should have two agencies, each
relieving the same people in the same wholesale way, the Employment
Exchanges with their scale, asking whether a man is unemployed, and how
many children he has to support, and paying him so much, and the
Guardians with their scale, asking only the same questions and paying
him so much more. It would obviously be simpler, more economical, and
more satisfactory in every way, if one or other of those agencies paid
the man the whole sum. And I have no hesitation in saying that that
agency should be the Central Government. Perhaps the strongest argument
in favour of that course is that, when relief is given locally, the
money must be raised by one of the worst taxes in the whole of our
fiscal system, local rates, which are tantamount to a tax, in many
districts exceeding 100 per cent., upon erection of houses and buildings
generally. It is foolish to imagine that any useful end is served by
keeping down taxes at the expense of rates.
Serious as is the problem of national finance, the fiscal resources of
the Central Government are still far more elastic and less objectionable
than those which the local authorities possess. I suggest, accordingly,
as a policy for the immediate future, the raising of the scale of
national relief to a more adequate level, coupled with the abolition of
what I have termed wholesale outdoor relief in the localities. What it
is right to pay on a uniform scale should be paid entirely by the
Central Government, and local outdoor relief should be restricted to its
proper function of the alleviation of cases of exceptional distress
after special inquiries into the individual circumstances of each case.
One final word to prevent misconception. I have said that our present
system of relief is unsatisfactory, and I have indicated certain
respects in which I think it could be improved. But I am far from
complaining that relief is being granted throughout the country as a
whole upon too generous a scale. Anomalies there are which, if they
continued indefinitely, would prove intolerable. But we have been
passing through an unparalleled emergency. Unemployment in the last two
years has been far more widespread and intense than it has ever been
before in modern times, and never was it less true that the men out of
work have mainly themselves to blame. But it has meant far less
distress, far less destruction of human vitality, and I will add far
less demoralisation of human character than many of the bad years we had
before the war. That is due to the system of doles, the national and
local doles; and in the circumstances I prefer that system with all its
anomalies to the alternative of a substantially lower scale of relief.
We are still in the midst of that emergency; and if we are faced, as I
think for this decade we must expect to be faced, with that dilemma
which I indicated earlier, I should prefer, and I hope that every
Liberal will prefer, to err by putting the scale of relief somewhat too
high for prudence and equity rather than obviously too low for humanity
and decency.